We left Chicago on time, and landed in Belgium as expected. The highlight of flight was a double-feature, Just Wright and The Devil Wears Prada. You walk away from those two movies feeling like you should have been paid for sitting through them. The clouds in Brussels were less than 500 feet above the ground, so as you looked out the window all of a sudden you saw the aiport and were on the ground 20 seconds later. The airport is fairly big, and they don't make gate assignments until 45 minutes before departure. So you end up sitting around waiting in the middle of the terminal, going to your gate only a few minutes before the flight boards. The 2-hour Malev Hungarian flight from Belgium to Budapest was uneventful, and like Austria customs in Hungary was non-existent.
Upon exiting baggage claim we were immediately greeted by employees from Ford of Hungary holding signs with each of our names. Remember when I said it was important that Larry Coan is a Ford employee? I'll go into more detail later this week, but in short Ford has provided the entirety of Team USA with some very nice vehicles, 12 in total. After a 30 minute drive to a suburb north of Budapest we were presented with our very own Ford Transit (for transporting the balloon) and Ford S-Max. Neither is available in the US, but nonetheless both will serve us very nicely during our visit.
After that we drove back down to Budapest airport to retrieve the balloon from air cargo.
Then came a 2½-hour drive to Debrecen, the site of the event. We checked into our hotel at about 6:15pm local time, then had some dinner.
I tried to call my family from the hotel, but the Internet connection isn't the best. The audio was spotty at best, and a video call is out of the question. It's frustrating - I'll need to come up with some other way to talk with them. Uploading photos to this site works, but it takes a long time (3-4 minutes per picture). Video clips may be sparse again this year.
As I write this at 10:30pm local time (4:30pm Michigan time) we've now been awake for 34+ hours without sleep. So a nap is probably in order. Tomorrow we're planning to drive the 2½ hours back to Budapest to be tourists. On Thursday we'll assemble the vehicles and start getting ready to fly, with morning and evening practice flights (hopefully) on Friday and Saturday. The weather here is very much like Michigan - 50's and 60's during the day, 40's at night.
Joe Heartsill and Steve Jones have their teams in Debrecen already, with Owen Keown, Nick Donner, and Johnny Petrehn scheduled to arrive tomorrow. On Thursday the last batch of Americans, including Larry Coan, will show up.
